Obama rules the Twitterverse

President Barack Obama is king of the world — the world of Twitter at least.

According to Burson-Marsteller’s annual Twiplomacy report, @BarackObama beat out Pope Francis (@Pontifex) for the most followed world leader on Twitter with 33,510,157 followers as of July 1 (the account has 34,520,490 followers as of Wednesday). The pope came in second with more than 7 million followers.

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Despite his large following, Obama’s tweets are on average only retweeted 2,309 times versus Pope Francis’s 11,116 retweets for every tweet on his Spanish account. His English tweets receive on average 8,219 retweets.

Obama’s account is the fourth most popular account on Twitter in general, right after Lady Gaga’s. The official @WhiteHouse account takes third in the world leaders list, followed by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an (@RT_Erdogan).

Obama is following only two other world leaders, compared with Swedish Foreign Minister (@CarlBildt), who the report called the best connected world leader, mutually following 44 peers. Ugandan Prime Minister @AmamaMbabazi is the most conversational world leader, the report found, with 96 percent of his tweets being replies to other Twitter users.

The study found that more than three-quarters of world leaders have a Twitter account.